To Mary Mason Fairbanks
10 March 1868 • New York, N.Y.
(MS: CSmH, UCCL 00200)

New York, March 10.

Dear Mother—

A day or two ago I found out that the Alta people meant to publish my letters in book form in San Francisco—also that they refuse to let me use them in my book. Neither suits me. My publishers want me to write the book all over new, & not [mind ] the what the Alta does—but that won’t do. Consequently I have packed my trunk this afternoon, & sail for California to-morrow, to return in June. Good-bye, & good luck. I am in a great hurry.

Saw Mrs. Duncan last night. She said the Captain had gone to Cleveland.1

I am so glad of an excuse to go to sea again, even for three weeks.

My mother will be grieved—but I must go. If the a Alta’s book were to come out with those wretched, slangy letters unrevised, I should be utterly ruined.

I shall write you from California. And although I am just now “out of luck,” I know that I shall be all the more kindly remembered by the forgiving mother of an erratic “cub.”

Always Respectfully &
Affectionately

Sam L. Clemens
Occidental Hotel,
San Francisco.2

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

Editorial Signs

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1 Hannah Tibbets Duncan (1821–69), Captain Duncan’s wife of twenty-seven years, had accompanied her husband (and two young sons) on the Quaker City voyage. Captain Duncan delivered his lecture about the excursion, which was sponsored by the Christian Associations, on 10 March in Cleveland’s Case Hall before a “fair audience” (John E. Duncan, viii, 156; Cleveland Leader: “Lecture This Evening,” 10 Mar 68, 4; “The Lecture Last Evening,” 11 Mar 68, 4).

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2 Clemens was planning to stay at the lavishly furnished Occidental Hotel, at Bush and Montgomery streets. opened in January 1863 under the management of his friends Lewis and Jerome Leland, it was Clemens’s favorite stopping place in San Francisco (ET&S1, 474). In January 1868 the hotel had been sold to Edwin Chapin and Gardner Wetherbee (“Occidental Hotel,” San Francisco Evening Bulletin, 2 Jan 68, 3).

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

MS, Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif. (CSmH, call no. HM 14224). Mrs. Fairbanks wrote the words “And my” as well as a series of practice strokes, in ink, to the left of the closing and signature.

Previous publication: L2, 202–203; MTMF, 23–24.

Provenance:see Huntington Library, p. 512.

Emendations and textual notes:

mind • mind | mind [corrected miswriting]